Testing

How did testing and accountability become the main levers of school reform? How did our elected officials become convinced that measurement and data would fix the schools? Somehow our nation got off track in its efforts to improve education.  What once was the standards movement was replaced by the accountability movement. What once was an [...]

Marking Readiness

In her newest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education, Diane Ravitch outlines the primary causes behind today’s deterioration of our schools, and prescribes four vital courses to generate education reform. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), according to Ravitch, largely contributed to the problems plaguing today’s schools.  The [...]

not on the test

I’m guessing this one will get around or even maybe already has, but I have to go ahead and post it here. My first successful video blog!. Enjoy (and thanks to Steve Elliott for letting me know about it):

Standardized tests vs. the tradition

The Christian classical educator does not determine his success by measurable academic or developmental outcomes, because he comes at it from a different angle. Those are trivial and inevitable compared to what really matters. Instead, the Christian classical educator assesses his success by the simple objective of whether he has succeeded in handing on the [...]

Static vs. Dynamic assessment

There are two common reasons for testing. First, the static fashion of determining roughly (and often rather arbitrarily) what students have learned and can repeat from the curriculum. Second, the dynamic fashion of assessing what has been learned so the teacher can adjust to the realities of the students’ experience. A third reason is, of [...]

A good solution

A while ago I posted on an article from Wendell Berry in which he presented a model of thinking that seems to me to be essential to understanding and living with reality. It’s an ancient way of thinking, rooted in accepting our limits and loving wisdom; and it’s a way of thinking that seems to have [...]